Wednesday, January 26, 2011

#openZIM is not supported here

The off line reader for #Wikipedia will be based on openZIM. Now openZIM is one of several formats that are actively maintained for use in off line readers. One of them has been specifically developed for use with Indic languages and others like Okawix and WikiReader are internationalised and are localised in many languages.

A choice has been made for a tool that has no obvious qualifications to support the over 270 languages supported by Wikipedia.

The good news is that at translatewiki.net we are quite happy to support competing applications. As we reuse existing localisations for new applications, openZIM may even benefit from the work that has been done on off line readers.

So Wikimedia Foundation, it is not obvious why you support openZIM. OpenZIM is not supported here but that can be remedied when you care for supporting all the languages of Wikipedia.
Thanks,
     GerardM

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

openZIM is a data format, like ODF. Could you elaborate what you would like to translate there?

GerardM said...

OpenZIM is supported in an application maybe multiple applications. When there is no internationalisation or localisation for these applications, there is no reason to believe that openZIM will work for other languages and scripts.
Thanks,
GerardM

Anonymous said...

Would you be able to describe what should be done, so that somebody else can then do it?

spinz said...

I think what Gerard is referring to is to get Kiwix into translatewiki and getting it translated into multiple languages.

The openZim format is language agnostic so it wil intrinsically support any format as is evident if you take a look at the available downloads at

http://kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page

If that's the case then the action plan is pretty simple. Get Kiwix into translate wiki.

GerardM said...

Yes, please get Kiwix and related tools localised at translatewiki.net..

Instructions can be found here.
Thanks,
GerardM

Kelson said...

Localization is now a new discussion topic for Kiwix. We will both evaluate needs and solutions.

GerardM, please come directly to me if you have additional questions, remarks, wishes.